I have just learned about the proposed patent policy. I think that
W3C's should enable and favor free and open web standards, as was
the case until now. The proposed policy (RAND) opens the door and
gives legitimacy to non-free standards for the web, to the advantage
of (big) software companies and to the disadvantage of the free
software community and their users. Taking into account the utterly
questionable use of software patents by software companies (which
patent trivial ideas, ideas that were previously well known in a
slightly different context or ideas that heavily rely on previous
un-patented and publicly known works), I think opening the ``RAND
door '' should be avoided and the proposed policy abandoned.
laurent klinger